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Vanessa Rosa

Dates: June 5 – June 26

Vanessa Rosa is a Brazilian visual artist and art historian. She creates projects that mixtures public art, community activities, technological experiments and historical research, usually having painting as her main medium. Currently she has been developing a research about ethnocomputing/ethnomathematics, studying the algorithms embedded in traditional arts from worldwide cultures. Vanessa has worked as project coordinator for different organizations and is an illustrator and art director for Viajante do Tempo publishing company, being one of the company’s owners. She has done mural paintings, residencies, exhibitions and other projects in different countries across South and North America, Europe, Africa and Asia.

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Rupesh Bhattarai

Dates: June 3rd-June 14th

Project: Rupesh will be working on a children’s’ storybook project. The storybook features true stories of local individuals in Kathmandu working in technology.

Bio: Rupesh is an educator and a writer living in Kathmandu.
A primary school classroom is one of his most favorite places to be in. Rupesh started reading child magazines in kindergarten, developed a love for writing in the second grade, an unquenchable awe and enthusiasm to learn science when he was a fourth grader.
His interests have pushed him to become an educator working to foster modern thinking skills in his students through STEAM education, with “Karkhana”.
He is a part of the “Word Warriors”, a local spoken word poetry community in Kathmandu. He performs in local poetry gigs, and experiments with different aspects of poetry with “Kavindrapur”, a little poetry collaborative that he co-founded.

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Setting up spaces – May 25, 2561 [dinaBlog]

Setting up spaces

May 25, 2561

Me and Tasneem really won with the venue we scouted out. Everyday is full of hard work that’s constantly offset by impromptu adventures and side-quests:

  • A gigantic gecko appears in the house and we drop everything to get good macro-shots of its fascinating feet,
  • we left something on the ship and we need some intrepid kayaks to retrieve it,
  • the dragonflies are suddenly congregating around the solar panels for some mysterious reason,
  • or you are putting out a small fire on your off-grid power system, and suddenly a golden tree snake wrapped in a wriggling death match with a monitor lizard plummets 20 meters down onto the ground next to you.

The monitor lizard is now inside the snake

I am convinced that one could work any boring job forever if there was constant, curious entertainment always being provided from a thriving, natural surrounding.

One thing I have learned about myself though, is how much joy i take from setting up creative spaces.*** A favorite aspect is how when setting up a maker space you constantly develop mutating philosophies about everything:

  • If the electronics bench is closer to the entrance than the biology bench, does that mean that we are saying it is somehow more important?
  • Oh it’s kind of nice working in the secluded biology area, maybe i will do some soldering there.

  • Is it TOO easy to setup a naturalist workstation on a porch of a house?
  • I need to set up ways to stop birds from stealing my tools.
  • If i set the lab up here, i can watch hornbills fly by at 6pm, but only after the 5 pm wave of mosquitoes make it unbearable.

  • All walls should be covered with tools, or else it is useless space.
  • Oh it would be nice to have some wall space for some pictures or maps

  • A lab is a complete failure unless everyone can access any tool within 2 seconds
  • A lab should have categorization clues in its layout that can guide you to finding something
  • In a good lab you at least KINDA know where things might be?
  • This box will just be labelled “miscellaneous “ (i promise i will limit this to one box)
  • This section of the house will be labelled “miscellaneous “ (please stop it from spreading)
  • A messy lab where you don’t know where everything is one of the most important tools for sparking creativity

  • It’s kind of nice having to kayak to the boat lab to get tools for the jungle lab
  • The soldering irons are all the way across the room? Screw it, I’ll just tape these wires together

  • We can’t put THOSE tools into drawers because they aren’t used enough and everyone will forget about them
  • THESE tools are used too much and can never be put in drawers because it will be too cumbersome to keep opening and closing them
  • Maybe drawers are awful? Abolish drawers!
  • Ahh! scrap fabric is perfect for drawers

https://photos.app.goo.gl/4fOkPXSgtCpOCGgM2

I like having the endless challenges of having to adapt some vague models of human movement styles, information displays, and ergonomics to the ever-changing needs of the environment, the living creatures, the anxiety of the landlords, and basic spatial geometries. Even the tools themselves have very particular needs which become even more apparent as laboratories move into the wild. You quickly learn which equipment can’t deal with high humidity, or salt water,  or being carried over rough terrain, or being dropped and lost in grass, or deafeningly loud cicada calls. It’s a tiring practice, but one that puts you deeply in touch with both your tools and the living world surrounding you. It’s refreshingly humbling.

***Through my dealings at various institutions, I have also learned that the opposite is true, and seeing places of creativity crushed meaninglessly is enraging.

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Erik Zepka

Erik Zepka has a wide field of interests, with having previous experience as a lab biologist, artist, media creator, writer, and hacker. He is open to all of DINACONs  themes, with a slight preference for creating an art project while being here on the island, throwing his background in the mix.  With this, he will attempt to create ‘ science fictional environments’  for the viewer, that will combine critique of bureaucratized science, open research speculation and play, taking advantage of what the immediate environment best affords.

 

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Shreyasi Kar

Dates- 29th May to 5th June

Project(s)- Interspecies communication with plants and collaborative mapping of Dinacon.

Hi! I am Shreyasi, an artist from Bangalore, India. I study New Media Design at Media Lab Helsinki, Aalto University and live in Helsinki, Finland.  Some of the projects I am currently working on are – robot petting zoo, ecosystem songs, interspecies communication.

During my my time at DiNaCon, I want to set up a communication network between Tree 0 (in Helsinki ) and Tree 1 (on Koh Lon). Over time, I am hoping that this communication will reveal to us how trees/plants sense and respond to their environment and changes within it.

I would also like to make a collaborative map of DiNaCon. The map is in 2 parts, one which is bound by the geography of Koh Lon based on peoples experiences at DiNaCon and the other, a map of the network and collaborations that arise out of DiNaCon. Ideally this will be online and searchable and will have all kinds of amazing filtering possible but maybe an analog mapping workshop will be a good place to begin from 🙂

Some of my work can be found on http://shreyasi.in/.

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Pearl Ryder

Dates: May 27 – June 7

Project: Island edible plant survey and documentation in collaboration with Craig Durkin.

Side hustle: interviewing the cool people at DinaCon and creating podcasts focused on the wonderful weird world of how we find our way in the professional world

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Huiying Ng

Dates: 13-20 June 2018

Email: huiying.n@gmail.com

Project:

What I’m doing

Using the geospatial map as a point of departure, I’ll be planning and making a database and map of edible plants on the island that can reflect as many categories of functionality as possible for DINACON participants.

I’ll be doing some walks around the island with people, exploring digital map interfaces but also working with paper-based maps. In my free time I’ll be working on a soil testing kit!

I need your help for the edible plant map! I want to know:

  • What will people do or want to do with local plants?
  • What will people use them for (or be used by plants for?)
  • Are there specific things you are looking out for in the plant varieties on the island? In ways related to your project, or even just for food/medicine?
  • What sort of natural remedies would you be interested in trying? (I am not a trained physician, this is just for fun.)
  • Are you looking for a certain kind of ecological habitat?

 

Some ideas I’m having about functions and categories for this map. Get in touch if you wanna work on something together!

 

e.g. of functions:

– food

– structures based on the material, durability, tensile strength of the plant etc

– structures based on the lifespan of the plant

– shelter for animals

– for soil: nitrogen-fixing properties, long roots aerating soil

 

e.g. of categories:

– ecological function it contributes to island’s flora: structure (for height, tall plants), bush, water catchment area…

– Temporality: plant’s growth rate

– Function for DINACON participants: e.g. food, ecology, structure

– Input needs by humans or animals e.g. reproduction through seed dispersal, reproduction through planting

 

Bio:

Huiying explores links between urban agriculture, new imaginations of urban life and socio-technical transitions, and community resilience. She is completing a thesis on agroecological learning assemblages  in Southeast Asia at the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. She is a founding member of the Foodscape Collective, a citizen research collective in Singapore that aims to expand a knowing of foodscapes by reading and walking them differently, and a part of TANAH. She has presented a mixture of individual and collective work on commons and food in the Netherlands, Canada, and the Substation and NTU Centre for Contemporary Art in Singapore. She shares her work here.

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Raune Frankjær

[01/7 – 07/7]

I will spin some webs and lace up some tree(s). The webs will be connected to trees with bio-sensors and emit acoustic signals mediating the plants inner state, blending with the local soundscape…well, so the theory…

Hopefully it will sing  ….

Bio: Currently I am a Phd student at Aarhus University in Denmark, combining craft and digital tech to engender sympoietic experiences and new relationships between us humans and all the others with whom we share the planet. I have a M.A in Intermedia Design from Germany, a Diploma in Photography from South Africa, and a few years training in Architecture. I am also an self-taught artisan and maker.

more about me here: http://frankjaer.de

 

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Sjef van Gaalen

Dates: 22 June – 02 July. Research & Designer. Futures & Fiction, Collage & Camouflage. Attending Dinacon as part of the Random Forests project (http://randomforest.nl/), investigating the emerging field of environmental machine learning through fieldwork and critical reflecton.

Working on an iteration of our workshop investigating Autonomous Agents for Regenerative Ecologies, building on earlier sessions during fieldwork on the Dutch island of Terschelling, and at the Border Sessions festival in The Hague (June 13th if you’re interested!)

https://www.sjef.nu/
https://twitter.com/thesjef/
https://www.instagram.com/strctrnrrtv/